Building PacSun’s Drop-Ship Business

01

Find another growth lever

Around 2015–2016, as I remember it, PacSun needed another way to grow. Growing assortment the conventional way meant buying first: decide what would sell, own the inventory, carry the risk. I began building Drop Ship as another lever. Vendors could ship their own products directly to our customers, which meant we could put far more of what they already carried in front of shoppers without buying it in advance.

02

Start with two brands

I began the proof of concept with exactly two brands: Volcom and O’Neill. Two established vendors were enough to prove the model could actually work before the emphasis shifted toward bringing as many approved vendors into the program as we could.

03

Inventory ownership becomes selective

Drop Ship did not replace conventional buying. It made inventory ownership selective. PacSun could still buy the products it wanted to own while exposing more of a vendor’s long-tail assortment through vendor-direct fulfillment.

That changed what we could consider selling. The model opened room to consider skateboard and surfboard hardgoods, video games, and electronics—categories PacSun would have been unlikely to buy outright. Looking back, I also came to see Drop Ship as a proving ground for emerging brands we could not or would not buy conventionally: a brand could show us what it did with real customers first, though there was no formal rule or guaranteed path from there to a buy.

04

Scale the vendors, not just the integration

After the proof of concept, the work was not to repeat an integration. It was to bring more approved vendors in, and to keep acquisition, assortment, systems, and reporting moving together as we did. I owned that program end-to-end and stayed accountable for where it went.

The preserved 2020 Drop Ship worksheets show that work in motion: vendor discovery calls, a Q1 target to onboard 16 brands, seasonal assortment work, scorecarding and reporting, and vendors sitting under Launching, On-Going, and Upcoming. They record what we were aiming at and what was in flight—not what we hit.

05

Operate the business every day

Drop Ship was never a finished integration; it was a business that had to be run. Vendors had to be found and onboarded, assortment agreed, reporting maintained, money reconciled—and underneath all of it ran the exceptions, the returns and cancellations and customer problems that fell into the gaps between systems and teams. The 2020 worksheets still carry customer service, invoicing, returns, and cancellations as On-Going work, which is what they were: open, not resolved.

End-to-end ownership did not mean I wrote the integrations, chose every item, or handled each payment, shipment, return, or customer case myself. Buying, Technology and Logistics, Finance, Customer Service, our vendors, and the platform providers each did their own work. What I owned was the capability—holding it together, and answering for it when it did not hold.

06

Learn to own what I could not control

This was my first substantial experience owning a business capability like this. I had to learn unfamiliar technical and operating concepts quickly, including EDI processes I had not previously known existed. I wanted to scale faster than the resources allowed. Work was deprioritized, goals were missed, and integration and operating complexity slowed things down. None of it was dramatic. It was the steady friction of a program that ran on other teams’ roadmaps as much as my own.

The deeper lesson was that accountability and direct control are different. I remained responsible for the capability’s direction and operation even when the systems, specialist teams, and vendor actions it depended on sat outside my authority. Progress came from coordination and follow-through, not from doing the work myself.

07

What the capability became

Drop Ship began well before PacSun’s later replatform, continued through it, and remained afterward through my 2023 departure. The replatform did not introduce the program; Drop Ship was a separate commerce capability that had to keep operating across that change.

What started with two brands became a standing part of how the company could grow. Inventory ownership was no longer a prerequisite for everything PacSun wanted customers to see, which left room for long-tail assortment, nontraditional categories, and brands too new to buy. What I took from building it is smaller and more durable than the program itself: a capability is not a launch. It is the thing you keep operating after it works.